5. Make boot floppies

Both installing via net or CD needs bootstrapping with floppy
disks. In this chapter we will learn where to get floppy images,
and how to make useable boot floppies from them.

5.1. What floppies to make

First we need a boot floppy. This will be a custom compiled
Linux kernel image able to boot on the 7248. Then we need one
or more ramdisk images.

Debian Woody

For Debian, we need a boot floppy and one ramdisk
floppy. You can download necessary files from http://users.linpro.no/ingvar/43p/images/Debian/
. The files are called
debian-7248-boot.img and
debian-7248-ramdisk.img . (The
ramdisk image is the root.bin from Debian boot-floppies)

Yellow Dog Dayton

For Yellow Dog we need a boot floppy, and no less than
three ramdisk floppies, because of the size of the
installer. I have built custom ramdisk images for the
7248. The files are called
ydl-7248-boot.img,
ydl-7248-ramdisk-1.img,
ydl-7248-ramdisk-2.img and
ydl-7248-ramdisk-3.img, and are
available from http://users.linpro.no/ingvar/43p/images/YellowDog/.
You will need all the ramdisk files.

SuSE 7.3

For SuSE, we need a boot floppy and one ramdisk
floppy. You can download necessary files from http://users.linpro.no/ingvar/43p/images/SuSE/
. The files are called
suse-7248-boot.img and
suse-7248-ramdisk.img. (The latter
is copied from ftp.suse.com)

Mandrake Bamboo

For Mandrake, we need a boot floppy and one ramdisk
floppy. You can download necessary files from http://users.linpro.no/ingvar/43p/images/Mandrake/
. The files are called
mdk-7248-boot.img and
mdk-7248-ramdisk.img. (The latter
is a copy of the all-r6sk.gz from the Mandrake cd)

If you use Netscape or another web browser to download the
files, you should check that the sizes of the downloaded files
are correct. Some versions of Netscape tend to uncompress
compressed files, and we want to keep them compressed. If
strange things things happen at boot time, try using another
program for downloading the files, like wget or lynx.

5.2. How to make the boot floppies

Use always errorfree 1.44MB floppies for these images. The
commands shown here is for a working Linux system. They
might work on other UNIX systems as well. On some systems
you may have to be root to write directly to the floppy drive.
In those cases, so du a 'su root' before issuing the commands.

MS-DOS users may use the rawrite utility. You can download
rawrite from several places, for example a RedHat mirror as
ftp://ftp.uninett.no/. More information on how to use
rawrite here.

To make the boot floppy, insert a floppy in the drive, cd to
the directory containing the boot floppy image and issue the
following command, substitute "debian" to your distributon prefix if
necessary.

dd if=debian-7248-boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b

Label the disk "Boot floppy" or whatever you like.

To make a ramdisk floppy, insert a floppy in the drive, cd to
the directory containing the ramdisk image, and issue the
following command. Substitute the filename with an image for
your distribution of choice, like "ydl-7248-ramdisk-2.img" for
the second YellowDog ramdisk floppy image.

dd if=debian-7248-ramdisk.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b

Label the disk "Ramdisk floppy #1" or whatever you like.
Remember that Debian and SuSE has one ramdisk floppy. For
Yellow Dog, you need three.